


Unburying

by yikesola



Series: wlw-dnp [3]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2019, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Established Relationship, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, neglected self care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-06 23:24:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19072807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yikesola/pseuds/yikesola
Summary: An alert interrupts her:“Landed! Home soon bb”Dani tosses her phone onto the coffee table and sits up for the first time in an embarrassing amount of hours. Being left to her own devices makes it all too easy to slip into her worst habits. It’s one of the many reasons she’s grateful that she never lived on her own.An au fic about bad habits and waiting to welcome home.





	Unburying

About eight hours ago, Dani woke up buried in the moon room’s grey duvet to a text from Phoebe. _“Going ✈️ London!”_

 _“babe that’s….. there’s no irony there. that’s a completely unironic use of the going✈️ meme”_ Dani texted back. 

_“Going✈️ on my way to fuck your bitch”_

_“YOU’RE my bitch!”_

_“👀”_

_“idiot 😩 i’m in love with an idiot”_

_“😘”_

Now all these hours later, Dani’s getting restless, stir crazy. Phoebe’s flight back in from Florida is going to land any minute now. She’s expecting every alert on her phone to be a text saying that Phoebe’s almost back home. 

Instead, the alerts are a load of stupid news banners that stress her out immediately because the planet is boiling and Theresa May’s being a cunt, or push notifications from the various social media apps she’s supposed to be taking a break from. It was easier last week, at the writer’s retreat where the Wi-Fi was shit and she was busy most of the day. Now she’s sitting at home, no Phoebe to distract her, and a world of apps to sink into. 

She spends some time on Instagram, double tapping for FKA Twigs and Charlie XCX pics. She shifts over to Twitter and likes some ContraPoints and Young Minds posts. 

She doesn’t touch Facebook because her anxiety is still high from the news alerts and she just wants to sit amongst social media’s stupid numbing influence right now, something she’s not going to find on a site riddled with older relatives. 

She’s been lying on her back all this while, feet flung over the arm of the sofa. Now she turns onto her side, and stretches until her spine pops before diving back into the pull of her phone screen. 

She’s scrolling through the Tumblr app, something she used to do so often a few years ago, and now almost never does. It’s, first of all, such a shitty app. Half the posts as she scrolls by are unloaded gradients. And besides, she’s trying to limit her screentime. Yes, the hypocrisy and futility occur to her. And when that inevitably fails, she’s at least trying to cycle routinely through different apps instead of staying too long on one of them. 

Sometimes, like today, she’ll go through and like a spree of art: a small token of appreciation for the attention her and Phoebe’s fans give to capturing what moments they can. She tries not to look at other things, the memes and social justice posts and fandom gifsets that used to occupy so much of her day. She’ll just get sucked in again, endlessly scrolling, until her eyes sting red. And she doesn’t want to look like a cave troll when Phoebe finally comes home, even if she’s been living like one for the last few days. 

But then a poem does catch her eye, one that she reads over a few times, aloud but under her breath so she can catch the rhythm. 

She likes it— in the emotional sense. Not in the sense that she hits the like button. She wouldn’t dare, not on something so blatantly queer. Her Tumblr likes are public after all; people would see. 

Still, she reads it over again. She doesn’t want to lose it. She sits up and grabs one of the many pads of post-its they have littered around the flat, this one from the wicker basket of loose things by the end table. 

The poem is by Pat Parker; Dani’s heard that name before. It’s upstairs on a bookshelf, buried in one of Phoebe’s anthologies from the poetry course she took during her first year in uni, and through which sometimes Dani pokes. But Dani hadn’t read this particular poem before, she’s pretty sure. She would’ve remembered it. 

_“For Willyce”_  
_When i make love to you_  
_i try_  
_with each stroke of my tongue_  
_to say_  
_i love you_  
_to hammer_  
_i love you_  
_to melt_  
_i love you_

_and your sounds drift down_  
_oh god!_  
_oh jesus!_  
_and i think_  
_here it is, some dude’s_  
_getting credit for what_  
_a woman_  
_has done_  
_again._

Fuck, that hits Dani in her shoulder blades. Makes her feel something she isn’t sure the name of— only knows she likes it, only knows it feels startlingly true. 

Another alert interrupts her, one which she had let her guard down for once on expecting: _“Landed! Home soon bb”_

Dani texts back, _“going✈️ nut *dabs*”_

 _“Maybe I don’t understand anything about memes actually…”_

_“😘”_

Dani tosses her phone onto the coffee table and sits up for the first time in an embarrassing amount of hours. Being left to her own devices makes it all too easy to slip into her worst habits. It’s one of the many reasons she’s grateful that she never lived on her own. 

It’s the dark corners of her brain that crave self-destruction. 

She knows perfectly well how important basic self care is to staying on top of her depression recovery. And it’s not like she actively or actually wants to fall back into the hole again, not any more than the regular and random expected days that pop up every once in a while. It’s that she can’t help herself; when she’s alone with her own thoughts and no distraction whatsoever, she really can’t help but convince herself she deserves to live like a gremlin girl. 

The last few days have been filled with messy sleeping patterns, too many naps in the lounge, meals that weren’t exactly meals but whatever junk she could convince herself to eat because bodies need caloric intake whether you feel hungry or not. Her unwashed hair is falling in her face and reminds her that she neglected showering as well— she stands a little too quickly and feels that faint fuzzy sensation as her blood rushes towards her long limbs, then makes her way to the bathroom. Even if Phoebe could guess that Dani would let her basic self care slip the last few days, she doesn’t want to make it too easy for her to detect. 

She showers quickly, but thoroughly, and the grime of the last few days rinses down the drain. 

By the time the front door of their flat opens, and there’s the muffled sound of Phoebe dragging her suitcase across the floor, Dani’s halfway through painting the toenails of her left foot and she’s pissed that she can’t head downstairs without messing them up. “Feebs!” she shouts, “Phoebe!” before the excitement overtakes her and she remembers she can just repaint them later, but she can only kiss Phoebe hello after not seeing her for days right now. 

Phoebe’s answering her shouts, chirping “Dani, Dani, Dani!” along with the sounds of her tripping while kicking off her boots. 

Dani finds her there half a second later, bent over the mess of boots and backpack and suitcase which clutter the entryway. The warmth that fills her at the sight is intoxicating. She steps over Phoebe’s suitcase to wrap her arms around her and take in Phoebe’s smile and kiss her in a way that says clearly, “Welcome home.” 

“Hello, you,” Phoebe says, pulling away. 

“Hello hello,” Dani says as she leans into Phoebe’s body, pushing her against the closed door, and tilting towards her neck. 

“No, wait,” Phoebe laughs, “let me shower all the plane germs off of me.” 

Dani holds her tighter. “I missed you,” she says. 

“I missed you too, dork. But I’ve had a million people breath on me since I got to the airport and I don’t want another stupid cold.” 

“Maybe I could join you?” Dani waggles her eyebrows. 

Phoebe shakes her head, “I have something else in mind, no need for shower sex.” 

She pouts, feeling a little righteous petulance. It’s a side-effect of the last few days’ bad habits, she figures, but she feels it all the same. Phoebe looks like she’s almost willing to find this compelling, but then shakes her head instead. 

“Maybe you could rustle up some grub in the meantime?” 

“Ugh,” Dani groans, “You’ve been in America too long!” 

“Thought you’d like that,” she smiles. 

“I hated it.” 

“Mm-hmm,” Phoebe kisses her quickly before digging for her toiletries bag within her larger suitcase. She leaves the rest of her mess in the entryway, which would annoy the hell out of Dani if she weren’t suddenly aware of how hungry she actually is since Phoebe mentioned it. By the time Phoebe emerges from the cloud of shower steam, Dani has arranged takeaway Wagamama on the coffee table. 

“Consider the grub rustled,” she smiles. Phoebe laughs at the sub-par joke, because she always does and dammit Dani loves her for it. 

Phoebe sits down, ready to dig in, but Dani sees the post-it she’d used earlier and left on the table catch her eye. Phoebe reads it over and says airily, “Do I need to be jealous of Wyllice?” 

“That’s a Pat Parker poem, goof,” Dani sits beside her. “Do you even _have_ an English degree?” 

“English Language and Linguistics!” she says, a defensive hand over her heart and a laugh to accompany it, “don’t start quizzing me on poetry and Dickens or whatever it was those plain English degrees studied.” 

“Whatever,” Dani waves her hand towards the food, “eat up, Lester. You promised me something hotter than shower sex, and you should know I’ll be building up my expectations until you deliver.” 

Phoebe places a hand on either side of Dani’s face and pulls her into a kiss that has way too much intensity for the moment despite all of Dani’s teasing. She feels dizzy and drunk off of it and unwilling to question Phoebe’s timing. “Oh, I’ll deliver, Howell,” she says against Dani’s teeth, hardly pulling back enough to speak. “I missed you so much.” 

This moment shakes off the last dregs of her self-destructive poor habits from the last few days, Dani thinks. Things already feel normal again; the interruption of their daily habits that came in the form of Phoebe being half a world away doesn’t exist anymore. 

Dani curls a finger around the short strands of hair at the nape of Phoebe’s neck. She feels like herself again. Showered, soon to be fed, head out of her phone screen, and the air smelling of Phoebe’s shampoo. She can’t wait to all but imitate the poem sitting on the coffee table beside them, to melt and hammer and try to say with her tongue that she loves Phoebe, and that she alone deserves the credit for Phoebe’s answering sounds— no man, not even God or Jesus.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading— come say hi on [tumblr](http://yikesola.tumblr.com/post/185341947984/unburying) !


End file.
